Klassik  Chor/Lied
Staatskapelle Weimar & Daniel Morgenroth & Opernchor des Deutschen Nationaltheaters Weimars & Jac van Steen & Wendy Walter Phoenix resurrexit OC 313 CD
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FormatAudio CD
Ordering NumberOC 313
Barcode4260034863132
labelOehmsClassics
Release date1/1/2010
Release date1/1/2001
salesrank18764
Players/ContributorsMusicians Composer
  • Jost, Christian

Manufacturer/EU Representative

Manufacturer
  • Company nameNAXOS DEUTSCHLAND Musik & Video Vertriebs-GmbH
  • AdresseGruber Straße 46b, 85586 Poing, DE
  • e-Mailinfo@naxos.de

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      Description hide

      Christian Jost (*1963)
      Phoenix resurrexit
      Odyssey in four parts for soprano, speaker, choir and orchestra Staatskapelle Weimar
      Jac van Steen conductor
      Opernchor des Deutschen
      Nationaltheaters Weimar
      Wendy Waller soprano
      Daniel Morgenroth speaker

      Phoenix Resurrexit is for me in many respects a special work. Not only because the composition of the piece extended over some four years, but also because Phoenix resurrexit developed during its creation into a never-ending exposition of the whole palette of highs and lows of the creative process.

      Thus the title became a compositional programme of recurring destruction, creation and renewal, with only a single constant: nothing could keep me from writing Phoenix. Over the course of four years, the piece moved off into the far distance as the Constellation of Pegasus, only then to become accessible again, near the moon, and in the end to emerge as the fulfilment of a childhood dream.

      This dream began in 1969: at seven years old, together with my mother, I experienced from our homely living room the landing on the moon. By the time the „Apollo 11“ capsule splashed down in the Pacific Ocean, my decision had become firm: I wanted to become an astronaut. However, the family holidays in the Alps that took place at this time and the eight to ten hour car journeys connected with them forced me to rethink radically. For what future astronaut could permit himself constant vomiting in a VW estate car? Thus I became a composer.

      It is the blessing and the curse of compositional work to make the unknown and the idiosyncratic fascinatingly accessible to experience. Thereby one dives into much alien – not always weightless – space, which can, however, have on a few listeners an effect as hostile to humans as that of the outer space of the astronauts.

      To elicit from music sounds that contain within them an odyssey whose thrilling story is painted by the composer is the task and the ambition of my whole compositional work. Of all my creative work up to the present time, Phoenix resurrexit demanded the most intensive engagement.

      When I first had the idea of composing a larger work that would cast creation into a new light, from the point of view of an astronaut and with the knowledge of space travel, Oliver Buslau and I sought out appropriate texts. The wheat was separated over and over again from the chaff through my deeper penetration into the subject, and Phoenix resurrexit has become a concentration distilled down to the bare essentials.

      Thus the soprano has unambiguously taken on the role of the phoenix, that mythical bird of perpetual renewal. Its ever recurring words appear during the treatment at the most varied places. It thus becomes a metaphorical symbol embodying simultaneously: mythic exoticism and love, the beginning of the discovery of the eternal and the immanent certainty of the Apocalypse.

      Following the primal concept of the creation, this permanently occurring condition of the simultaneous creation and destruction of life, I have created a corresponding treatment which I have described as an Odyssey in Four Parts. The task of the speaker is to bear this four-part Odyssey as his own and to make it manifest, as if to tell the tale of a journey through the „self“.

      The four parts are:

      Dawn – Creation
      Phoenix
      Apocalypse
      Love – Eternity

      With all the complexity of the subject and the musical structures used, the unifying concept, the overall dramaturgy, is a kind of symphonic super-form consisting of an exposition, an Adagio, a Scherzo, and an apotheistic Finale. The various musical components, from which the whole network is woven, sound forth in ever varying dramaturgical moments; they are positioned in ever changing relationships, light up the same thought in a different context, and give contrasting meanings to that which is said and to that which sounds.

      In connection with Phoenix resurrexit, two other works were written whose musical material influenced Phoenix and developed it further, following their own dynamic:

      Rhapsody II – Song of the Phoenix, for Violin and Piano
      Sinfonia – Dream of the Phoenix, for Orchestra.

      The unifying element of the three works is not only various sounds and notes but the fascination with creation and its simultaneous destruction and renewal.

      Christian Jost, August 2001


      Tracklist hide

      CD 1
      • 1st Part: Dawn – Creation
        • 1.1st Scene08:49
        • 2.2nd Scene07:37
        • 3.3th Scene03:39
      • 2nd Part: Phoenix
        • 4.4th Scene03:54
        • 5.5th Scene05:31
        • 6.6th Scene02:16
      • 3rd Part: Apocalypse
        • 7.7th Scene04:32
        • 8.8th Scene09:49
      • 4th Part: Love – Eternity
        • 9.9th Scene02:50
        • 10.10th Scene03:04
        • 11.11th Scene02:58
        • 12.12th Scene03:48
      • Total:01:11:27